Is the New START Just the Nuclear Version of Health-Care Reform?

By Russ Wellen

THE DEPROLIFERATOR -- Thus far, the Obama administration's ideas of financial and health-care reform are, at best, tweaks to systems that cry out to be razed to the ground before reconstructing. While, ideally, it shouldn't matter, these are subjects in which the president never showed much interest. The new START treaty, which he and Russian President Medvedev agreed to sign on Thursday, is, of course, a different matter. As the New York Times reported last year:

Realist or dreamer, Mr. Obama has an interest in global denuclearization that arises from. � his two years at Columbia. "He's been thinking about these issues for a long time. "� said Michael L. Baron, who taught Mr. Obama in a Columbia seminar on international politics and American policy. � In a paper for Dr. Baron, Mr. Obama analyzed how a president might go about negotiating nuclear arms reductions with the Russians. � At critical junctures of Mr. Obama's career, the subject of nuclear disarmament has kept reappearing.

Do the terms of the new START reflect the president's soft spot for disarmament then? Let's first outline reservations on the part of some analysts. Here's Russian nonproliferation authority Pavel Podvig speaking off the cuff at Global Security Newswire:

It's creative accounting. ... They found a way of making reductions without actually making them, and they were happy to accept that because nobody wanted to go to more serious measures.

His thoughts about measures are somewhat more, uh, measured at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

As a disarmament measure, it will be a very modest step. The treaty will set a ceiling of 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads -- technically a reduction of more than 30 percent from the current levels -- but almost all of the reductions will be accomplished by changing the way the warheads are counted. That means most of the warheads will still be in the U.S. and Russian active arsenals.

At the Federation of American Scientists' Strategic Security blog, Hans Kristensen concurs in a post bluntly titled New START Treaty Has New Counting:

Yet while the treaty reduces the�legal limit for deployed strategic warheads, it doesn�t actually reduce the�number�of warheads. Indeed, the treaty does not require destruction of a single nuclear warhead.

Also at Strategic Security, Ivan Oelrich writes:

The treaty makes some modest reductions from the SORT [treaty] but not large enough. . . to make a�qualitative difference in the nuclear standoff between. . . the two Cold War superpowers. [Nor does it constitute anything like] a fundamental rethinking of how we deploy our nuclear weapons.

Once again we're in the territory of tweaks as opposed to genuine reform. The enduring enormity of our mutual arsenals aside, a commenter to Oelrich's post notes another obvious shortcoming:

But what I see as this new treaty�s biggest failure is that it's still bilateral, without even provisions for other strategic nuclear powers to enter into it.

On the other hand. . . Podvig again:

What is important is that the treaty provides the public with a way to hold the U.S. and Russian governments accountable for the nuclear weapons they possess. As I�wrote�a year ago, "A strong mechanism of transparency and verification is much more important than any specific number of warheads that the treaty eventually will mandate."

Kristensen agrees:

Indeed, the New START Treaty is not so much a nuclear�reductions�treaty as it is a verification�and�confidence building�treaty.

But how does it look from the Russian point of view? Martin Matishak provides us with a glimpse at Global Security Newswire:

Russians have "great doubts" about the new compact because "nuclear weapons are for the Russian people now much more important than" [during] the Cold War and are viewed as the last reliable pillar of the country's national security, according to [Russian nuclear weapons expert Alexi] Arbatov. � Articles have already started appearing in respected Russian military magazines and newspapers calling the original Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty "traitorous" and "detrimental" to national security. � Such publications represent the "opening salvo" of a campaign that would be waged against the new treaty once it is signed and presented for ratification by the lower house of the Russian parliament. � [Arbatov] also noted that the 1993 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty II took the Kremlin seven years to ratify.

How about the U.S. Senate? Oelrich again:

Given the very modest nature of the treaty, it should sail through ratification, in a normal political climate. � But after the passage of the health care bill, the Republicans may be unwilling to give President Obama a foreign policy success.

Finally, Oelrich answers the question posed by the title of this blog:

If this treaty is a preview of the soon-to-be released nuclear posture review. . . then we will know that transformation of the nuclear danger is merely a theoretical aspiration not an actual goal of the administration.

First posted at the Faster Times.